Sensory Appeal: Sight Matters

I've written about this topic before, but the fact that food images are powerful marketing tools deserves mention again. In the same Oxford study (see Addictive Foods) that noted that pictures of chocolate triggered areas of the brain…

Bad Intuition: Too-Thin Slicing

The concept of "thin slicing" was popularized by Malcom Gladwell in is best-selling Blink. In short, thin slicing is the ability for people, based on their past experience, to find patterns in behavior, appearance, etc. with a very small…

Fitness Marketers Need to Get Brainy

Back in March, I predicted a fitness boom following a huge Newsweek cover story on exercise and the brain (Brain Improvement to Spark Fitness Boom). I'm still waiting. My own health club hasn't had an observable influx of older members…

AdAge: Neuromarketing or Neurohype?

Advertising Age's Mya Frazier has taken neuromarketing to task in Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science? Despite the alarming title, the article itself is reasonably balanced in content if not in tone. Frazier highlights some of the same…

Contest Marketing: Beating the Odds

In This is Your Brain on Money, I mentioned that I'd visit some of the other neuromarketing-related topics raised in Jason Zweig's interesting article in Money, Your money and your brain. One of these is that our brains are programmed for…

Adult Brains Can Change

For those of us past the age of childhood, there's good news from MIT and Johns Hopkins: conclusive proof that adult brains are capable of reorganization and change. While there has been considerable evidence of brain plasticity and…

Selling the Unsellable

Can you imagine a more difficult marketing task than selling books written by long-dead authors like Plutarch or Pliny the Younger to middle-class Americans? To make the challenge even more difficult, the books are priced well above most…

The Obesity Epidemic and Addictive Foods

There's an epidemic of obesity in the U.S., and new research helps explain the difficulty many people have in avoiding fattening foods. British researchers have shown that chocolate acts on the brain in a way similar to addictive drugs.…

Women DO Like Pink Better

If you thought that "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" was mere gender stereotyping, you'll be surprised by research results that show women really do prefer colors with more pink in them. Anna Hulbert, a neuroscientist at Newcastle…